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Greek Ontology and the 'Is' of TruthAuthor(s): Mohan
MatthenReviewed work(s):Source: Phronesis, Vol. 28, No. 2 (1983),
pp. 113-135Published by: BRILLStable URL:
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Greek Ontology and the 'Is'of Truth
MOHAN MAT-FHEN
This is an essay about the ontological presuppositions of a
certain use of 'is' in Greek philosophy - I shall describe it in
the first part and present a hypothesis about its semantics in the
second.
I believe that my study has more than esoteric interest. First,
it provides an alternative semantic account of what Charles Kahn
has called the 'is' of truth, thereby shedding light on a number of
issues in Greek ontology, including an Eleatic paradox of change
and Aristotle's response to it. Second, it finds in the semantics
of Greek a basis for admitting what have been called
'non-substantial individuals' or 'immanent characters' into
accounts of Greek ontology. Third, it yields an interpretation of
Aristotle's talk of 'unities' which is crucial to his treatment of
substance in the central books of the Metaphysics.
I. A COMPREHENSIVE USE OF ABSOLUTE 'IS'
1.1 Some Examples
There is a use of 'is' in Greek philosophy that comprehends both
the idea expressed by our 'is' of existence (whether or not that
marks a separate use of 'is' in Greek) and that expressed by the
copula. For example, Aristotle sometimes states the Principle of
Non-Contradiction in this way: "It is impossible for the same thing
both to be and not to be". It is obvious from the generality of
this principle that even though the use of 'is' it contains is
absolute (and would thus normally be identified as denoting
existence), it is meant to comprehend both existential and
predicative states of affairs - that is, it prohibits a thing
existing as well as not existing, and equally it prohibits a thing
being both F and not-F for any value of'F'.1 (Similarly for Plato's
category of things "that are and are not" - Republic 478 de - these
are things that both exist and fail to exist, that are F as well as
not-F.)
There are many other examples of this use of 'is'. Thus consider
the
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generality of Plato's and Aristotle's definition of falsity (and
of Aristotle's corresponding definition of truth): To say that what
is is not and what is not is is false. (See Sophist, 240 de and
Met, 1011 b 26-27). Again, there is Aristotle's statement at De
Interpretatione 19 a 23: 'What is necessarily is when it is; and
what is not necessarily is not when it is not' etc. This is
supposed to cover not only existential situations like that alluded
to in 'There will be a sea-battle tomorrow', but also situations
that Aristotle himself characterizes predicatively, as in 'This
coat will be cut up'. From an earlier period there is Protagoras'
famous dictum: 'Man is the measure of all things, of what is that
it is, of what is not that it is not'. Obviously this applies to
what is absolutely, but as Plato understood it in the Theaetetus,
it also applies to whether the wind is cold, or whether the wine is
bitter.
1.2 How Not To Treat These Examples
The occurrences of 'is' above cannot easily be assimilated to
any of the more familiar uses of 'is'. For example, they cannot be
treated as instances of the so-called 'incomplete copula'2 because
the principles in which they occur range also over existential
situations best described in terms of absolute 'is'.3 Conversely,
they cannot (given the normally accepted exis- tent objects,
individual substances and properties) be treated as involving the
'is' of existence because this would leave out predicative states
of affairs.
It might be thought that a good way to describe our use of'is'
is as a kind of schematic variable, that is as standing for no one
notion, but doing double duty for two or more different notions,
standing for whichever is most appropriate at a given moment. Thus
one might be inclined to say something like this: "When Plato says
that sensible things both are and are not, he means both that they
exist and do not exist as well as that they are F and not F for at
least some values of 'F'."
Useful though such a periphrasis might be as a reminder of the
range of the quantifiers that might govern occurrences of our 'is',
for example in the principle of non-contradiction, it is clearly
inadequate as a theory of how 'is' comes to be used in this way.
After all, it sounds grammatically unac- ceptable to abbreviate 'is
F' by 'is' (except in the limited range of cases mentioned in note
2), and so we need to explain how philosophers so diverse in time
and style as Protagoras, Plato and Aristotle came to use so opaque
a stylistic device.
The problem becomes particularly acute when we notice that there
are times when these philosophers seem to treat comprehensive uses
of 'is' as
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standing for a unitary notion. Three important examples of this
may be mentioned here. Plato slides, as Kahn has noticed,4 between
two formu- lations of the eternality of Forms - he says, with no
indication that these are different, both that something is
eternally F and that the F-itself is eternally. In a similar vein,
Aristotle puts his theory of categories in dif- ferent ways, saying
sometimes that 'is' is said in many ways (EN, 1096 a 23), sometimes
that the categories are "figures of predication" (Met, 1017 a 23),
and in yet other places that the categories are kinds of the
things-that-are (Cat, I b 25: note that onta embodies an absolute
construction of einai). It is as if Aristotle does not distinguish
here between the claims that there are many sorts of 'is F'
constructions, that there are many sorts of existence, and that
there are many uses of the verb 'to be'. Finally, we should note an
unusually explicit use of the 'An F is'/'Something is F'
transformation. In describing Protagorean relativism in the
Theaetetus (156 ff.), Plato describes a theory of perception in
which a perceiver and a thing perceived come together, thereby
begetting "twins", one of which is a sensation and the other is
something described, for example, as a whiteness (156 d), a
sweetness (159 d) or a bitterness (159 e). The result of this birth
is that the passive parent, the thing perceived, comes to be
characterized by the corresponding adjective - that is, it becomes
white, or sweet, or bitter. "The object that joined in begetting
the colour is filled with whiteness and becomes in its turn, not
whiteness but white, whether it be stick or stone" ( 56e; cf. 159
de). Here an equivalence is established between '(An) F-ness comes
to be' and 'Something comes to be F.5
All these philosophers (I am assuming that Protagoras was
accurately represented by Plato, but if this is false read 'Plato's
Protagoras' for 'Pro- tagoras') were making, in the examples cited,
claims in the theory of Being: Plato is interested in establishing
that Forms (as contrasted with sensibles) are things-that-are (not
things-that-are-and-are-not), Aristotle in showing that there is
not just one kind of Being, and Protagoras in showing that Being is
measured by men. But Being here comprehends, as we have seen, both
the existential and the predicative, and the formulation of these
claims displays a strange ambivalence between the 'is' of
predication and that of existence6 - just that ambivalence that we
found in our 'is'. This seems to show that Greek philosophers tend
to treat our 'is' as unitary, or at least that they treat it as
corresponding to some unitary notion of Being. It is thus not
merely by place-holding that it acquires its comprehensiveness.
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I. 3 A Formal Characterization of Comprehensive 'Is'
Let us look once again at Aristotle's ontic statement of the
principle of non-contradiction (e.g. at Met, 1006 a 4-5).
0: It is impossible for the same thing both to be and not to
be.
Evidently (see note 1), this principle is meant to be equivalent
to a predicative statement:
P: It is impossible for the same thing both to belong and not to
belong to the same thing at the same time (+ some qualifications
that do not concern us here: Met, 1005 b 18).
The condition under which P and 0 are equivalent is:
C 1: For all x and y there is a z such that x belongs to y if
and only if z iS.7
Thus Aristotle's use of 0 and P to state the same law implies
that he at least implicitly subscribes to Cl.
A similar result can be obtained by scrutinizing Aristotle's
definitions of truth and falsity at Metaphysics 101 1 b 25: a
judgement is true if it says that what is is or what is not is not,
otherwise it is false. By inspecting the definiens and definiendum
we derive:
C2: For all propositions, p, there is an x such that p is true
if and only if x is.
C2 accounts also for the (presumed) equivalence of the ontic
statement of non-contradiction above with the alethic statement of
the principle at Metaphysics 101 1 b 14.
C I and C2 constitute what I have been calling the
comprehensiveness of the 'is' that we are discussing. And C2 is the
condition that justifies calling it 'the 'is' of truth'. Our task
is to explain why Greek ontologists accepted these principles.
I.4 Further Evidence and Two Bad Theories
An interesting application of our "comprehensiveness axioms"
comes in connection with change. At De Gen et Corr 316 b 34-317 a
10, 319 b 25-31 and Physics 190 a 10-12, Aristotle maintains that
every alteration is
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accompanied by a perishing and a creation. Suppose, for example,
that a man ceases to be artistic. This change in the man is
simultaneously accompanied, he says, by a creation of an unartistic
and a perishing of an artistic or by the creation of an unartistic
man and the perishing of an artistic man. (He does say that these
are not creations or perishings in an unqualified sense. This is a
point that will concern us later. For the moment we shall be
concerned only with why they are creations or generations in any
sense.)
This point is presupposed also by Aristotle's characterization
of poiesis as concerned with genesis (EN, 1 140 a 10). It is
evident that Aristotle is here contrasting poiesis, an activity
that derives its value from a consequence, with praxis, an activity
that has "intrinsic" value (i.e. regardless of what might result
from it), and that this distinction has nothing whatever to do with
whether some previously non-existent thing is brought into being.
For example, medicine involves poiesis, though typically we should
not want to say that it brings anything into being; rather it
brings a man to health. The point that Aristotle is making is that
it is essential topoieseis that they create changed circumstances,
for these give them their value. But according to the terminology
established in the De Gen et Corr and Physics, any change is
accompanied by a genesis; there is no difference between saying
that an activity results in changed circumstances, and saying that
it is concerned with genesis.
Evidently Cl and C2 ground these otherwise puzzling assertions.
A creation occurs when something that was not comes to be. An
alteration, on the other hand, occurs when something that was not F
comes to be F, or when a false (undated) statement comes to be
true. (See Cat, 4 a 22 ff.) But according to C 1 something is if
and only if x is F, and according to C2 something is if and only if
p. Thus if x comes to be F, or p comes to be true, something comes
to be. And this is the assertion that Aristotle makes.
Interestingly, the De Gen et Corr and Physics passages tell us
how to characterize the entity in question: when an X comes to be F
we are to say either that an FX comes to be, or simply that an F
does. We have encountered two other passages in which the latter
transformation occurs: Theaetetus 156 e and 159 de. And it
parallels the duality noted between 'Something is F' and 'An F is'.
Let us call this the indefinite transformation. It allows us to go
from 'Socrates is/becomes F' or 'A man is/becomes F' to 'An F
is/comes-to-be'. The other transformation (observed at De Gen et
Corr, 319 b 25-31) allows us to go from 'An X is/becomes F' to 'An
FX is/comes-to-be'. Let us call this the attributive
transformation. It is part of our task to explain these
phenomena.
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The application of comprehensiveness to change represents a
perhaps unexpected degree of continuity between Aristotle and his
predecessors. Parmenides, for example, had argued (fragment 8,
lines 6-8) that creation is impossible, but apparently concluded
(for example at line 26 of the same fragment) that all change is
impossible. This has been diagnosed as fallacious reasoning, as a
confusion between two quite distinct uses of 'is', namely the
existential and the predicative. And it has also been claimed8 that
Parmenides was not confused; rather that he was using a "fused"
conception of Being, i.e. one that combines existence and
predication. The claim is that in Parmenides' case at least,
comprehensiveness is to be explained by (con)fusion.
However, Aristotle cannot be accused of any such confusion, or
fusion. In the De Gen et Corr he clearly distinguishes between
creation and alter- ation, which can be defined as follows:
x is created = x was not and x is. x is altered = For some F, x
was not F and x is F.
These definitions seem to presuppose a clear distinction between
absolute and predicative uses of 'is'; and they exploit this
distinction in order to formulate the concept of a sort of change,
alteration, that permits a con- tinuing subject. It is thus
unlikely, to say the least, that a confusion or identification of
these uses could be what explains the correlativity of alterations
and creations, or Aristotle's commitment to comprehensiveness.
These comments have a consequence for the interpretation of Par-
menides. What in his writings forces us to assume that his theory
of 'is' is to be blamed for his conclusion that all change is
impossible? Suppose that the difference between alteration and the
other changes were pointed out to him. Could he not still argue as
follows? "I now recognize that alter- ations are not the same as
creations. But every alteration is accompanied by a simultaneous
creation (and by a destruction). I have shown that creation is
impossible - there is no such thing. So there is no such thing as
alteration either." So even if he does confuse or fuse distinct
uses of 'is', it will not do for Aristotle or for us to criticize
him merely on the grounds of this error. Parmenides is simply
employing an inference that Aristotle endorses. Since Aristotle
does not think that change is impossible, it must be possible to
admit change into the logic of even this 'is'.
The problem then is this: What theory of 'is' permits the
distinction between alteration and creation given above, and at the
same time allows Aristotle to hold that every alteration is
accompanied by a creation? That is, what accounts for C I and C2
above, since these yield the desired result?
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Of secondary importance to us is this question: since merely
distinguishing between alteration and creation will not help
Aristotle evade the Par- menidean conclusion that that change is
impossible, how does he evade it?
I. 5 Kahn on the 'Is' of Truth
Let us look now at the proposal of Charles Kahn.9 Ignoring for
present purposes the admirable and useful syntactic sutb-
tleties of Kahn's account (most of which I can leave untouched,
since I am concerned with semantics), the proposal concerning the
semantics of 'is' in philosophical contexts comes to this. The
copula has two functions. It joins predicate to subject, and it
states of the sentence in which it occurs that it (the sentence) is
true. Further, there is an "essential ambiguity" in this second
function of 'is': it can be taken not only as saying that the
sentence in which it occurs is true, but also that the fact
"corresponding" to that sentence is-so, or obtains.
It is very important to realize that being-so, or obtaining, as
applied to facts is not existence. It is therefore important to
distinguish Kahn's pro- posal from one made by Wiggins according to
which Plato understood truth applied to sentences as equivalent to
existence applied to the corre- sponding facts.10 I find Wiggin's
proposal implausible (even as an account of ordinary intuitions)
for the following reason. Suppose that 'John is pale' is true, and
suppose that it is true precisely because there is a fact, John's
being pale. Now suppose that John acquires a tan and is no longer
pale. 'John was pale' is now true nevertheless. Is it not plausible
to say that the fact that once made 'John is pale' true is the very
same as the fact that now makes 'John was pale' true? If so,
ceasing to be true does not correspond to going out of existence.
It would be more appropriate to say that the fact in question
continues to be, but ceases to obtain, or be-so. This is precisely
what Kahn does say: he is careful to distinguish between being-so
and existence.11
We can see how well-measured Kahn's proposal is to accounting
for the comprehensiveness axioms. Why is there a thing that is for
every true proposition? Because 'is' can mean 'is true', and so to
say of a proposition that it is true is to posit a thing-that-is,
namely the proposition itself. Why is there a thing-that-is for
every property that belongs to an individual? Because there is, for
each such pair, a true proposition that asserts that the connection
holds.
Still, the proposal is not as simple as it may look. To
illustrate this, let us examine the question of how copula
modifiers are to be treated. Since
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Kahn's claim is that a single occurrence of a verb is
"overworked" or "overdetermined" - i.e. that it has,
simultaneously, two functions - one would imagine that any
modifiers would simultaneously affect both func- tions. But it is
easy to see that this cannot be so.
Consider tense. It seems that 'Socrates was sitting' contains a
tense modifier on the copula. But we cannot allow this modifier to
operate more than once. Our sentence says either that it is true
that Socrates was sitting, or that it was true that Socrates is
sitting. It certainly does not say that it was true that Socrates
was sitting. But how are we non-arbitrarily to read the same verb
in two roles at once, but the verb modifier only once? The
difficulty extends to negated copulae - these say either that the
positive joining of predicate to subject is false, or that the
negative joining is true, and obviously not that the negative
joining is false.
Kahn could attempt to get out of this difficulty by asserting
that the modifiers operate on a sentence as a whole, rather than on
the copula. But this is not a tenable theory of tenses in Greek or
any other Indo-European language. Nor is there any evidence that
Aristotle recognized sentential operators as distinct from copula
modifiers. Yet Kahn attributes to Aristotle an explicit awareness
of the "veridical nuance" of the copula. (He cites Met 1017 a 31-35
and Book 0, chapter 10.) Thus it will be difficult for him to deal
satisfactorily with Aristotle's theory of the modifiers.
Secondly, consider Aristotle's definition of truth and Plato's
similar definition of falsity: To say that that which is is and
that which is not is not is true. Kahn's claim is that these uses
of 'is' represent "the veridical construction proper" (Phronesis
XXVI, p. 106). Now the veridical con- struction is, we recall,
"*essentially ambigbuous" between 'is true' and 'is-so'. Aristotle
could not have been using 'is' in the first of these senses, for
then his definition would be trivial and uninformative. So he must
consciously have been using the second sense. Can it be plausibly
held, though, that Aristotle was this clear about the ambiguity in
the veridical construction, and yet made no mention of it, even to
warn his readers how he was using 'is'? I think not.
Finally, Kahn is robbed of the ability to treat of the Eleatic
paradox of change by assimilating it to that of negative
existentials. He is of course aware of this, and has an article
defending the view that Parmenides depended instead on the
"factive" nature of 'knows'.12 It is not my inten- tion directly to
take issue with Kahn's interpretation of Parmenides. But it is
relevant to note that Parmenides was reported by some of the
ancients in a way that does not support Kahn's thesis. For example,
Plato has the Eleatic Stranger in the Sophist report the views of
'my father Parmenides'
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in a way completely independent of knowledge (he uses other
psycho- logical attitudes, believing and saying), and explicitly
tied to the problem of negating being. Let us waive the question of
who is right about Par- menides, Kahn or Plato. The question is:
What account is Kahn to give of the substantial degree of credence
that Plato obviously gives to the argu- ment he reports?
These objections show, at most, that the application of Kahn's
proposal to certain ancient texts is not unproblematic. There is,
however, another more conclusive objection to his proposal. It is
that 'is true' and the copula are grammatically incongruent. The
former attaches, typically, to nominalizations of sentences or to
phrases, such as 'Pythagoras' theorem', that allude to sententially
complete utterances.13 The latter, by contrast, plays an essential
role in sentence formation, in the welding together of
sub-sentential parts. I want now to argue that Aristotle was
explicitly aware of this feature of the copula, and makes it an
essential part of his account of being. My account of Aristotle's
philosophical grammar will yield an explanation of the
comprehensiveness phenomena described above, and sheds light on the
other issues mentioned in the opening section of the present
essay.
11. ARISTOTLE ON THE SYNTAX AND SEMANTICS OF 'IS'
I. 1 'Is' as Dyadic: De Interpretatione, 1-4 In De
Interpretatione 1-3, Aristotle distinguishes between nouns and
verbs. Both are significant (semantikos), he says, but nouns
signify, whereas verbs signify about. Moreover nouns do not carry
tense, whereas verbs do.14
Now, 'is' carries tense, and in this respect it is like a verb.
However, it is made clear that in other respects it is not like a
verb. First, it is not significant, as verbs are, but only
consignificant: "By itself it is nothing, but it consignifies some
combination which cannot be thought of without the components" (16
b 24-26). Secondly, it is required in any whole sentence. "Falsity
and truth have to do with combination and separation. Thus names
and verbs by themselves - for instance 'man' or 'white'15 when
nothing further is added - are like thoughts that are without
combination or separation" (16 a 12-14).
The argument seems to be this: 'Is' consignifies "some
combination" (and 'is not' signifies separation?). Truth-bearers
require combination or separation. Therefore truth-bearers require
'is" or 'is not' (or some equivalent).
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Let us call a use of 'is' monadic if it must be completed by
exactly one term to form a sentence, dyadic if it requires exactly
two. Aristotle's remarks suggest (a) that the copula is dyadic, and
(b) that a subject- predicate sentence will incorporate a noun (the
subject), a verb (since the predicate will signify-about the
denotatum of the subject) and a copula (or equivalent) to "combine"
or "separate" these.
At first sight this seems a bad theory. For copulae are
required, it would seem, exactly where other verbs are absent. For
if we have a finite verb like 'runs' we can form a sentence without
the courtesy of a copula, e.g. 'The man runs'. However, a wider
examination of the texts provides us with an Aristotelian response
to this. 'The man runs' is equivalent, he thinks, to 'The man is
running' where 'running' is the participle functioning as an
adjective, and 'is' is the copula. (See De Int, 21 b 9; Met, 1017 a
28 and 1028 a 15; Phys, 185 b 27.)
Here then is one plausible account of Aristotle's theory of the
subject- predicate sentence: (a) It consists in the first instance
of two parts - a noun and a verb phrase. The noun carries no tense
and signifies the subject; the verb phrase carries tense and
signifies-about the ontological subject. (b) The verb phrase can be
split up into two functional (as opposed to syntactic) parts. It
instantiates the paradigm:
Copula equivalent + predicable denoter. This is not a
grammatical but a semantic observation, for sometimes the
functional parts will not correspond to syntactic parts. For
example, 'runs' (a verb phrase) cannot be syntactically broken up
in conformity with the paradigm, but is semantically congruent with
'is running'. On the other hand, 'is running' and 'is white' are
both syntactically and semantically instances of the paradigm.
This theory improves on Plato's Sophist (26 le-263d) grammar in
at least two ways. Plato had held that there are two parts of
speech, nouns and verbs, both of which reveal being (26 1e-262a),
and that a combination of one of each sort constitutes a statement.
By making the role of the copula- equivalent separate from that of
nouns and verbs, Aristotle is able to account for adjectival
predications such as 'The man is white'. Secondly, he is able to
account for the difference between 'the running man' and 'The man
runs', both of which are combinations of noun and verb, but only
one of which expresses a statement. The difference, according to
Aristotle, is that only the complete sentence contains the copula
equivalent - the other phrase has the same noun and
predicable-denoter, but lacks anything that consignifies
Being.16
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(c) Unfortunately for the clarity of both his exposition and his
own thought, Aristotle uses the term 'verb' (rhema) to denote both
the verb phrase taken as a whole, and the predicable-denoter by
itself. He presum- ably intends it to mean 'verb phrase' - he says
'a verb is what consignifies time' (16 b 6), that verbs are
inflected (16 b 16) and that verbs signify- about. On the other
hand, he probably has predicable-denoters in mind when he says (16
b 19) "When uttered by itself a verb is a noun and signifies
something","7 the point being that predicable-denoters stand to
predi- cables in just the way that nouns stand to what they
denote.18 Thus a predicable-denoter requires 'is' before it can be
adjoined to a noun to yield a sentence. (This explains 17 a 10-1 1,
which has been taken as evidence that 'is' is a verb.)
The theory that I have presented makes Aristotle absolutely
clear and explicit on the role and type of 'is': the copula links
sub-sentential denoting expressions, converting these into
sentences. There would seem to be no role here for the sentential
operator role that Kahn envisages.19 Kahn may wish to respond by
saying that it is Aristotle's intention here to deal with only one
of the two functions of the copula, reserving for Metaphysics r, 10
17 a 31-35, E 4, and e 10 a discussion of the veridical nuance. I
shall return to these passages later, after I have discussed why no
such ambiguity is required to account for the facts.
II.2 'Is' as Monadic: Another Look at De Interpretatione 1-4
Revealing though the above account is about Aristotle's
philosophical grammar, I do not think it tells the whole story. One
indication of this is that nowhere in the De Interpretatione does
Aristotle explicitly mention dyadic 'is', although he does mention
monadic 'is'. (I am indebted to David Hitchcock for this
observation, which seems to have been neglected by every
commentator on that work.) Thus he says thrice (16 a 9-19, 16 b
19-26, and 16 b 28-29) that both nouns and verbs need to be
supplemented by 'is', but can we conclude that 'Man running' is
similarly lacking an 'is'? Aristotle's claim seems to be that each
noun and each verb is lacking consignification of being and this
permits us to conclude that there is a need for a monadic use of
'is' - thus 'Man is' and 'Running is' are sentences20- but where
does he say that there is a dyadic use of 'is' to complete 'Man
running'? It is difficult to adapt Aristotle's remarks about 'is'
in the first four chapters of the work to dyadic 'is'.
But how can Aristotle manage without a dyadic 'is'? How could he
then account for 'The man is running', and other such examples
encountered in
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the last section? The following is a somewhat conjectural
suggestion; the rest of the paper deals with the advantages of
adopting it.
Two remarks in the De Interpretatione suggest that the monadic
'is' which attaches to simples such as nouns and verbs can be
applied also to complex terms that involve a combination of
simples. Thus: "Even 'goat- stag' signifies something but not as
yet something true or false - unless 'is' or 'is not' are added" (
16 b 16-18). And: "Even the logos of man is not yet a
statement-making sentence, unless 'is' or 'will be' or 'was' or
something else of that sort is added" (17 a 10-12).
Appended to the second of these remarks is a significant
comment. "To explain why two-footed land animal is a one not a many
belongs to a different inquiry; certainly it is not by being said
all together." When we look to one of the places where this
"different inquiry" is conducted, Metaphysics Z 12, we find the
following: "In the case of man and pale there is a plurality when
one does not belong to the other, but a unity when it does belong
and the subject, man, has a certain attribute; for then a unity is
produced and we have the pale-man." (My hyphenation; 1037 b 14-17.)
Aristotle then goes on to contrast this unity, the pale-man, with
definitional unities such as two-footed land animal.
These remarks point to a certain correlativity between
adjectives, including participles, in attributive and predicative
positions. We are dealing now with a problem that arises when we
see them in predicative position, namely that Aristotle does not
seem to notice that the 'is' in such sentences is dyadic. But
perhaps the reason that Aristotle does not make an explicit point
of this is that
The man is running can be transformed into the equivalent
The running man is. Could Aristotle not be assuming, in other
words, that all uses of 'is' corre- spond to a monadic use, and in
particular that the copula can be rmiade monadic by moving its
complement to attributive position?21 Such a monadic use of 'is'
would be attached not to a noun or a verb but to a complex term.
That monadic 'is' can be thus applied to complex terms is
explicitly permitted by the De Interpretatione but the existence of
dyadic 'is' is not.
Here then is a second account of Aristotle's theory of the
subject- predicate sentence in the De Interpretatione. (a) All
subject-predicate sentences can be regarded as consisting of 'is'
applied to a single term. (b) The term to which 'is' is applied may
be simple or complex. Examples of
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simple terms are 'man' or 'running'. A complex term consists of
a noun 22 modified by a predicable-denoter in attributive
position.
(a) and (b) need not be taken as grammatically analysing
subject- predicate sentences, for obviously the latter include
sentences with predi- cable-denoters in predicative position, and
it would be a gross mistake to assimilate this syntactic pattern to
the one that we are now discussing. Rather the claim is semantic:
both the dyadic 'is' and the monadic 'is' provide semantic
paradigms to which all subject-predicate sentences can be
assimilated, however these sentences may be phrased.23 Aristotle
sometimes uses one of these, sometimes the other, to make various
points about ontology.
III. PREDICATIVE COMPLEXES
III.I Introducing Predicative Complexes
Let us now introduce the notion of a predicative complex - an
entity formed, as Aristotle suggests in Metaphysics Z 12, from a
universal and a particular when that particular instantiates that
universal. (The predicative complex consisting of x and F does not
exist when x does not instantiate F.) The proposal in the first
instance is that terms consisting of a substantive with an
adjective in attributive position refer to such complexes when they
refer to anything at all. For example, 'artistic Coriscus' will
refer to a predicative complex when Coriscus is artistic, and to
nothing otherwise.
It will be obvious that predicative complexes correspond rather
closely to certain modern conceptions of facts, and to Russell's
conception of a true proposition. There is however a difference:
the modern conceptions I allude to are constructs out of
individuals and properties, where properties are, like Frege's
concepts, of a type distinct from the type of individuals. The
Aristotelian conception that I am trying to reconstruct consists of
individuals and predicables, where, because of the separation of
'is', the predicables are objects in Frege's sense of that term
(universal objects, of course). A predicative complex is therefore
the denotatum of a part of a sentence, and does not correspond to a
sentence as a whole. An apt way to epitomize this difference is to
note that the Russellian entity corresponding to 'Coriscus is
artistic' could be referred to as 'Coriscus being artistic': the
Aristotelian entity, on the other hand, is more properly called
'Coriscus- artistic' or 'artistic-Coriscus'. The point of
Aristotle's remarks on 'is' as I understand them is that a complete
thought is formed by attributing (monadic) being or non-being to
one of these complexes, and that the complexes do not contain
either of these as constituents.
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The notion of a predicative complex enables us to explain the
first comprehensiveness axiom: C 1: For all x and y there is a z
such that x belongs to y if and only if z is without having to
assume that the last 'is' that occurs in this principle (which is
monadic and absolute) means anything other than 'exists'. This is
because a predicative complex is a "unity" that exists only when
one of its components instantiates the universal that is the other.
Thus 'Simmias is large' is equivalent to 'Large Simmias is', and
the latter is equivalent to 'Large Simmias exists'.
These equivalences mark significant advantages. The first of
them makes sense of the attributive transformation noted earlier,
and thus of the predicative-attributive dualities we noted earlier
- the Platonic duality between saying that something is forever
beautiful and saying that some beauty forever is, and the
Aristotelian duality between the categories being "figures of
predication" and kinds of things that are.
The equivalence of'Simmias is large' and 'Large Simmias exists'
enables us to see why Parmenides and Plato (Sophist 237-241)
thought that false and negative sentences are paradoxical. It is
because negative sentences say that predicative complexes fail to
exist, and false positive sentences pre- suppose reference to a
non-existent predicative complex. Thus the problem of false and
negative statements reduces to the problem of false and negative
existentials. And we are able to achieve this reduction without
resorting to the dubious technique of making truth
fact-existence.
Our hypothesis helps make sense also of the occurrence of
phrases like 'artistic Coriscus' and 'musical man' in the
paragraphs on accidental one- ness, being and sameness in
Metaphysics A 6, 7 and 9 respectively. For it is plausible to
interpret Aristotle as saying that where Coriscus is accidentally
artistic, the artistic is accidentally the same as, and is
accidentally one with, Coriscus, and that artistic Coriscus
accidentally is. These theses (which I shall not work out in detail
here) help make sense of the following sort of utterance:
Examples of accidental oneness are Coriscus and the artistic,
and artistic Coriscus (for it is the same thing to say that
Coriscus is one with the artistic and that artistic Coriscus is
one). (Met, 1015 b 17-19)
Of particular interest to us is the correlation of the dyadic
'is one with' and the monadic 'is one' in the parenthetical remark,
using precisely the device that I have called the attributive
transformation.24
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III.2 Does Aristotle Analyse Truth in Terms of Existence?
It seems reasonable to suppose that if the notion of a
predicative complex can account for the first, predicative,
comprehensiveness axiom, then it could account for the second: C2:
For all propositions, p, there is an x such that p is true if and
only if x
is. This may well be the point of a much discussed passage in
Metaphysics A:
'To be' and 'is' indicate also that something is true and 'not
to be' that something is not true but false as is the case with
affirmations and denials. For example, that Socrates is artistic
(esti Sokrates mousikos), that this is true. (1017 a 31-35)
The traditional, and possibly most straight-forward, reading of
these words is as saying that 'is' can mean 'is true'.
The crux is in the words 'That Socrates is artistic, that this
is true' - to what does the 'this' refer? Presumably to the nearest
truth-bearer: that Socrates is musical. But the 'is' in the nearest
truth-bearer is not naturally taken as predicating anything of the
whole sentence in which it occurs. So there is some difficulty in
understanding the claim in the most straight- forward way.25
I should therefore like to take Aristotle's words in a somewhat
more oblique way, namely as claiming the equivalence of 'Artistic
Socrates is' and 'That Socrates is artistic is true'. The point
would then be that 'is' said-of predicative complexes indicates the
same thing as 'is true' said-of the corresponding judgement.
This is to some extent confirmed by Metaphysics E 4 and e 10
wherein it is claimed that being as applied to composite objects is
"combination and separation", which in turn parallels the claim
made in Z 12 that a certain "unity", the pale-man, is brought into
being when the man becomes pale, and the talk in the De
Interpretatione about 'is' consignifying "combination and
separation". Aristotle explicitly claims (1027 b 18 ff., 1051 b
33-35) that truth should be understood in terms of this being. And
we have already noted that Aristotle defines truth and falsity in
terms of an absolute 'is'.
I propose therefore that Aristotle be taken not as saying that
there is a use of 'is' that means 'is true'; just that truth, which
is applied to pro- positions, can be analysed in terms of existence
applied to another sort of thing.26
II.3 Change
Our conception of a predicative complex helps us understand how
to take the notion of creation in a natural way - as the coming
into existence of a
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thing - and still understand why, according to Aristotle
explicitly, and according to Parmenides implicitly, every
alteration is accompanied by an alteration. The trick is to regard
every alteration as accompanied by the creation of one predicative
complex, and by the destruction of another.
Obviously this will work only if a predicative complex like
pale-Conscus is not identical with Coriscus; for it requires that
pale-Coriscus cease to exist when Coriscus continues to exist. So
our proposals demand that on at least one use of the term, 'pale
Coriscus' be non-coreferential with 'Cor- iscus'.27
There is confirmation of this at Theaetetus 159 b-160 d. Here we
find Socrates explaining, on Protagoras' behalf, that a draught of
wine can seem sweet and pleasant to himself-in-health but bitter to
himself-in-sickness. What is striking about this passage from our
point of view is the use of the terms 'healthy Socrates' and 'sick
Socrates' to refer to momentary objects. Since the term 'Socrates'
would refer to an enduring object (whether or not Protagoras would
acknowledge the existence of such objects) it seems that the
terminology here presupposes that the term 'healthy Socrates' can,
as our theory demands, be understood as non-coreferential with
'Socrates'. (Thus Protagoras might want to say something like
'Socrates does not exist, he is nothing, but healthy-Socrates
exists momentarily', or 'Socrates is nothing but a construct out of
components like the momentary healthy- Socrates'.)
An inspection of the passages just cited from the Theaetetus and
earlier from Metaphysics A shows, by the way, that terms like 'a
colour', 'a bitterness' and 'an artistic' (or, with appropriate
ostensions, 'the artistic') are used as indefinite descriptions for
things like the white-stick, the bitter-wine etc., that is for
predicative complexes. (We noted earlier that Protagoras was
willing to say things like 'A bitterness comes to be', and this
could hardly be taken as announcing the creation either of e.g.
wine, a substance, or of a universal.) We have shown that artistic
Coriscus is not Coriscus. We can now supplement this with the
indefinite identity: artistic Coriscus is an artistic (not a
man).28 This helps us to account for the indefinite transformation
described which enables us to go from 'Cor- iscus/A man is/becomes
artistic' to 'An artistic is/comes-to-be'. And, be- cause
predicative complexes are individuals that are not substances, it
also suggests that they might be the individuals out of which
Aristotle con- structs categories other than substance.29
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III.4 The Expanded Ontology
Predicative complexes constitute a third ontological realm
distinct both from individual substances and from
predicables.30
Much of what Aristotle says about unities can be understood as
making distinctions in the realm of these entities. Thus accidental
unities are predicative complexes in which the predicable belongs
only accidentally to the individual substance, and essential
unities are those where this relation is essential - thus
two-footed Coriscus would be an example of an essential unity.
An interesting possibility concerns a third kind of unity, which
I shall call a definitional unity. An example of this would be
matter-with-form, for instance an ensouled-body. This is not an
essential unity because it is possible for the body to lack the
soul - and after death it will. But Aristotle seems to want to hold
that it is not simply an accidental unity either, because when an
unity of this sort comes to be, a new substance comes to be. (The
coming-to-be of a definitional unity is thus generation
simpliciter.) It is possible, then, that Aristotle conceives of
individual substances as themselves being predicative complexes,
albeit of a special sort, inasmuch as they possess definitional
unity. So if Aristotle is to distinguish between individual
substances and other predicative complexes, which are not in the
category of substance, it becomes important for him to distinguish
definitional unity from merely accidental unity, and this is what
he attempts to do in Metaphysics Z.
Somne such notion of definitional unity is required to help us
make sense of De A nima II, 1-2, in which Aristotle can be
understood as implying the truth of a number of identities of the
form 'A man is identical with a-body-with-certain-actualities'. The
objection has been made to this that it implies that men are
identical with bodies, which is false because bodies outlast men.
The difficulty is solved by making men predicative complexes, and
bodies components of these complexes. Obviously, this is plausible
only if some predicative complexes are individual substances.
A similar move suggests an interpretation of Aristotle's
representation of change. We saw earlier that Aristotle's
refutation of the Parmenidean proof that there is no change cannot
depend solely on the observation that alteration does not involve
non-being. It is conceivable that Aristotle depends instead on the
difference between the generation of complexes and the generation
of simples; this is supported by his terminology, which
distinguishes between genesis qualified and unqualified. If this is
right, Aristotle would reject the generality of the Parmenidean
principle that
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there is no creation or destruction, and accept it only in a
restricted realm, namely simples. To justify this restriction would
be a major task, but it would not be far-fetched to ground it on a
correspondent restriction of the principle that negative
existentials are logically faulty. Perhaps Aristotle wants to say
that only those statements that deny the existence of simples are
faulty. Perhaps this is in turn justified by observing that there
is no difficulty in understanding what is asserted when we say that
some combination of simples fails to exist provided that we know
what the simples are, since this is equivalent to saying that the
simples are not combined. If this is the right move, and if our
proposal about individual substances being definitional unities
composed of matter and form is accepted, then the way is open for
Aristotle to represent the coming-to-be of individual substances as
qualified, relative to the underlying matter.
It is reasonable to identify accidental predicative complexes
with immanent characters in the philosophy of Plato, and with
non-substantial individuals in Aristotle. Plato insists (Phaedo 102
d 5 ff.) that in addition to the bearers of properties, like
Simmias, and the properties they bear, such as largeness, there is
a third class of entity exemplified by the largeness- in-Simmias.
He also says that where Simmias admits the small, the large-
ness-in-Simmias "retreats". This means that there is an equivalence
between 'Simmias is large' and 'The largeness-in-Simmias exists' -
and this supports the identification. Aristotle too seems to
countenance such a class of entities: in Categories 2 he mentions
items like the individual knowledge of grammar that are in but not
said-of any subject.31
Gathering these suggestions together we should conclude that
predicative complexes are referred to not only by phrases like 'the
FX', but also by phrases such as 'the F-in-X', 'the F of this X',
'X's F' and 'This F'. Of course some of these phrases might be
ambiguous; and for instance 'the FX' might also be taken as
referring to the underlying substance, and 'the F of this X' might
be taken as referring to a property.
* * * *
I have argued in this essay for the recognition of a sort of
entity that is not familiar in modern ontologies. I have argued on
the basis of a syntactic and semantic analysis of certain uses of
'is', and found textual support for the analysis in certain texts
of Aristotle. In addition, the recognition of predicative complexes
enables us to give a unified treatment of a number of puzzling
features of Greek ontology.
It is possible that the Greeks may have regarded predicative
complexes
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not in the way I have presented them, namely as constructed
entities derivative from more basic types, but as the entities
given in perception, and so epistemically and even ontologically
prior. If so, we may find that in positing the Forms, Plato was
making a break with an ontology of predicative complexes, not, as
is usually thought, with an ontology of individual substances.
Similarly, it is possible that Aristotle posited individual
substances against the background of an ontology composed of
predicative complexes and Platonic Forms. These possibilities offer
the prospect of a richer appreciation of the development of Greek
ontology than is now customary.32
McGill University
NOTES
The statement of non-contradiction with absolute 'to be' is
implied at Metaphysics F 1005 b 24 and 1006 a 1, and occurs
explicitly at 1006 a 4. The juxtaposition of these statements with
the longer, predicatively phrased statement at 1005 b 18 shows that
no distinction is intended between the two ways of stating the
principle. 2 The incomplete copula is an apparently absolute use of
'is' that is actually elliptical for some copulative use. An
uncontroversial example would be: 'Is Tom well-dressed? Yes, he
is.' I very much doubt that one could justify a rule of grammar
that permits predicate-deletion except in such cases of repetition,
and so I suspect that the theory of the incomplete copula is
grammatically ad hoc. Fortunately, the theory that I will present
here renders this item unnecessary. 3 A similar point is made in M.
F. Burnyeat (ed.) Notes on Metaphysics Z (Oxford: The Sub-Faculty
of Philosophy, 1980). The use of 'is' at 1028 a 18 is said not to
be the incomplete copula on the grounds that it predicates
existence of certain universals. (Actually, the interpretation to
be advanced here will imply agreement with the assess- ment that
this is an 'is' of existence, but not that its subject is a
universal.) I Charles Kahn, "Some Philosophical Uses of'to be' in
Plato", Phronesis XXVI (1981), see especially pp. 107-109. 5 It
seems to me that Protagoras would have been prepared to say also
that something is F whenever an F is, were it not for the fact that
the durative implications of 'is' are inconsistent with his
endorsement of Heraclitean flux (as Plato portrays him in the
dialogue, 160 ae). But whether this is true or not, it is generally
true that facts about the durative copula, 'is', are paralleled by
facts about the mutative copula, 'becomes'. 6 It is, I think,
significant that the Categories 4 list of things-that-are includes
items that are predicated. 7 Thus suppose that C l is true. Let C
be an entity that is if and only if A belongs to B. (There is such
an entity; Cl ensures this.) Then if, per impossibile, A both
belonged and did not belong to B, C would both be and not be (and
conversely). Thus C l implies that 0 and P are equivalent. Again
suppose that Cl does not hold. Then there would be an individual
that both was and was not without some x belonging to some y, and
conversely.
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Thus the falsity of C I implies that 0 and P are not equivalent.
Thus C I if and only if 0 and P are equivalent. 8 See Montgomery
Furth, "Elements of Eleatic Ontology", Journal of the History of
Philosophy 6 (1968). 9 Kahn's theory is stated in several articles
and a book. Of these the most useful from a synoptic point of view
are the first and the most recent: "The Greek Verb 'To Be' and the
Concept of Being", Foundations of Language 2 (1966), and the
article cited in note 4, above. 10 David Wiggins, "Sentence
Meaning, Negation and Plato's Problem of Non-Being", in G. Vlastos
(ed.), Plato 1, (Garden City N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1971). 11 See his
"Why Existence does not Emerge as a Distinct Concept in Greek
Philosophy", Archivfur Geschichte der Philosophie 58 (1976), esp.
pp. 326-7. The argument I give is mine; Kahn relies on a
type-distinction between existence and being-so. The trouble with
Kahn's argument, as I see it, is that it does not prevent being-so
being what corresponds to existence in this other type, with all
the logical properties that Wiggins wants. Another argument with a
conclusion similar to Kahn's but based on the questionable
assumption that one and the same event can recur, is found in
Roderick Chisholm, "Events and Propositions", Nous 4 (1970).
For a sophisticated representation of events and the notion of
occurrence easily extendible to facts and being-so, see Richard
Montague, "On The Nature of Certain Philosophical Entities", in R.
H. Thomason (ed.), Formal Philosophy: Selected Papers of Richard
Montague (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1974),
especially pp. 148-150. 12 Charles Kahn, "The Thesis of
Parmenides", The Review of Metaphysics XXII (1969). "Parmenides is
concerned with knowledge in the sense in which it implies Truth ...
The 'is' which Parmenides proclaims is not primarily existential
but veridical" (p. 712). Thus the objects of knowledge must be,
i.e. must be true. 13 It is, I think, a significant feature of the
construction that Kahn calls "the veridical construction proper"
that it never allows 'is' to attach directly to a sentence or
sentence nominalization. Rather a verb of thinking or saying is
required: 'Things are as you say' etc. (There are idiomatic
exceptions to this rule: 'These things are' is a formula of assent
in Greek, and 'So be it' is allowed in English as well as Greek.)
Some explanation is required of this difference with 'is true'. 14
It is unclear where this leaves adjectives such as 'white' and
common nouns such as 'man' - these do not carry tense but they do
signify-about, that is they are used in predicate position. Perhaps
signifying-about is supposed to be compatible with signifying (cf.
Met, 1006 b 14-15). I shall make a suggestion about adjectives in
due course. 15 Is the suggestion that 'white' is a verb? But it
lacks tense. 16 The theory that I am attributing to Aristotle is
similar to the one held by Peter Abelard. Abelard raises the
problem of 'the running man' and solves it in the way outlined
here, and he introduces explicitly the notion of the
copula-equivalent; he calls this the vis copulativa. See Martin M.
Tweedale, "Abelard and the culmination of the old logic", chapter 6
of Norman Kretzmann, Anthony Kenny, Jan Pinborg (ed.), The
Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy, (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1982), especially pp 143-148. My point
is that most of the ingredients of Abelard's account are latent in
Aristotle's, and that they are required to make sense of what
Aristotle says.
For a further interesting account of some of the problems
discussed here, see J. M. E. Moravcsik, "Aristotle's Theory of
Catogories", in his Aristotle (Garden City, N. Y.:
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Anchor Books, 1967), pp 129-132. It would seem that Moravcsik's
innocent looking remark on p. 129, that Aristotle "treats 'being'
as a verb" creates difficulties in Moravcsik's discussion. We have
seen that this claim ought to be qualified. 17 This recalls
Abelard's point that there is little difference between adjoining
'is' to a noun and adjoining it to adjectives or participles. Both
procedures yield a verb-phrase. Why do Plato and Aristotle
distinguish in so sharp a way between common nouns and
predicable-denoters? For one answer to this question, see J. M. E.
Moravcsik, "The Discernibility of Identicals", Journal of
Philosophy, LXXIII (1976). 18 Some authors have thought that
Aristotle thinks of the sub-structure of the declarative sentence
in much the same way as Plato does in the Sophist. They thus
distinguish this theory from that of the early Plato who, according
to them, thought of predicates as names of universals, a tendency
that leads to the theory of transcendent forms. I have in mind
particularly G. B. Matthews and S. Marc Cohen, "The One and the
Many" Review of Metaphysics 21 (1967-68), and Joan Kung, "Aristotle
on Thises, Suches and the Third Man Argument", Phronesis XXVI
(1981). These authors attribute to Aristotle the insight that
predicates are not names, and try to found the priority of
substances over non-sub- stances on the difference in logical type
or function between these two categories of expression. I believe
that the De Interpretatione passages discussed herein throw some
doubt on the usefulness of this approach because they show that the
insight attributed to Aristotle is compatible with there being
names for items in the non-substantial categories. For further
discussion of the implications of this point see my "Aristotle's
Semantics and a Puzzle Concerning Change", forthcoming in 1984 in a
supplementary volume of the Canadian Journal of Philosophy devoted
to articles on Aristotle. 19 Kahn is certainly aware that there are
type-difficulties in his conception of the 'is' of truth: see his
review of Jonathan Barnes, The Presocratic Philosophers, in the
Journal of Philosophy LXVIII (1981). See also note 11 above. My
point here is that Aristotle's ciarity on type questions in the De
Interpretatione makes it unlikely that any type-confusion can be
attributed to him. 20 It might be doubted that 'Running is' is a
legitimate Greek sentence, but see the results of what I have
called the "'indefinite transformation" in section 1.4 above. Note
also that predicable-denoters occur in the list of onta in
Categories 4. This participle embodies an absolute use of 'is'. 21
The remarks made in the last section about separating the
predicable-denoting from the sentence-completing functions
continue, of course, to have force in this new representation. We
can thus understand Aristotle's comment at De Int 16 b 19, "When
uttered by itself a verb is a noun and signifies something.. . but
it does not signify whether it is or not". and the remarks at 16 a
12-19, as a pointed rejection of Plato's view (Sophist 26 le) that
nouns and verbs are "two sorts of revealers of being". The
separation of the copula would not permit this by itself since the
counterpoised opinions are clearly stated in terms of monadic
'is'.
The separation of the sentence-completing function and the
identification of this with monadic 'is' also throws some light on
Aristotle's characteristic doctrine that Being is not a genus.
Genera are denoted by predicable-denoters; 'is' does not denote a
predicable. The failure to understand this point can lead to the
misplaced expenditure of philo- sophical effort on explaining the
lack of "cognitive content" of Being or existence to explain
Aristotle's views: see Joseph Owens, "The Content of Existence", in
Milton Munitz (ed.), Logic and Ontology (New York: New York
University Press, 1973). Owens correctly treats 'exists' as
grammatically a predicate, but seems to assume that therefore
it
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must be semantically similar to other predicates. Put in these
terms, the problem becomes to account for the Aristotelian doctrine
about Being not being a genus without the help of the Aristotelian
account of'is' not being a predicable-denoter. 22 In Greek it is
permissible to construct a noun-phrase without the use of a noun -
for example 'hoi en agora' means 'the men in the agora'. I am not
sure whether this requires a broadening of the definition of
'complex term', because Aristotle may well want to assert that
nouns are implicitly present in such phrases - "optionally deleted"
as we should say - a doctrine that is made highly plausible by the
requirement that the article in such phrases agree in gender with
the approprate noun. (It is this requirement that enables us to
tell that the phrase 'hoi en agora' refers to men.) 23 I am being
cautious here: I want to distingush both syntactically and
semantically between 'x is F' and Fx is'. I think that given the
existence of whatever is denoted by 'Fx', 'F' and 'a', the two
sentences are equivalent but have different "sense and reference".
A parallel example would be the pair 'The snow is white' and 'That
the snow is white is true'. Given the existence of both the snow
and the proposition that snow is white, the two statements are
equivalent; but whereas the second makes a claim about the first
pro- position, the first makes a claim about the snow. My claim,
elaborated in 111.2, is that Aristotle sometimes explains the truth
conditions of dyadic 'is' sentences in terms of monadic 'is'
sentences, not that he ignores or eliminates the former. In this
respect his efforts are comparable to Tarski's, who explained the
truth conditions of sentences containing 'true' in terms of
sentences not containing 'true'. 24 Commentators have been baffled
by this and thus they have not always understood this passage in
accordance with the smoothest reading of the Greek - see
Christopher Kirwan's lucid discussion of the controversies
surrounding these lines in his commentary, Aristotle's Metaphysics
Books F, A, E (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1971).
Note, however, Kirwan's remark that "the artistic Coriscus is a
unified complex in which Coriscus - somehow detached from his
artistry - is a simple part" (134). It seems that Kirwan's
awareness of the implications of his own suggestion that artistic
Coriscus is a complex is not sufficiently explicit. Coriscus is
distinct from the artistic Coriscus simply because he is a proper
part of the latter - there is no need to detach him from his
artistry to secure the result. 25 Kirwan makes this point well in
his commentary, op. cit. 26 Points similar to those made in this
section are to be found also in an unpublished paper by John
Thorpe, "Aristotle on Being and Truth", read at the meetings of the
Canadian Philosophical Association held in Ottawa, June 1982. 27
Not realizing that there is this use of phrases like 'pale
Coriscus', C. J. F. Williams, in Aristotle's De Generatione et
Corruptione (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1982), says that 319 b 20
ff. (discussed above) "requires an incoherent understanding of'An
unmusical man came into existence' since it has to forbid the
inference to 'A man came into existence'." The same cause accounts
for the textual transposition made by Philoponus and Joachim at 319
b 28-20. See H. H. Joachim Aristotle on Coming to Be and Passing
Away (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1922), p. 109. Left where it is
in the manuscripts, the offending sentence says that the
musical-man and the unmusical-man are affections (pathe) of what
underlies. 28 These indefinite descriptions are used in the Physics
to identify aitiai, and it is possible that properly speaking,
aitiai are predicative complexes. This would account for the
apparent intensionality of aitiative contexts noted by J. M. E.
Moravcsik in "Aristotle on Adequate Explanation" in Synthiese 28
(1974). On the other hand the relation of
134
-
'accidental sameness" - i.e. the relation that holds of a pair
of predicative complexes or a predicative complex and an individual
substance when the individual substances in question are identical
- makes it possible to account for the apparent extensionality of
aitiative contexts noted by James Bogen in his comment on
Moravcsik's paper, provo- catively titled "Moravcsik on
Explanation", IOc. cit. 29 Let us distinguish between two forms of
words, 'X is Y' and 'X is a Y'. These have been thought to be forms
of predication, the first accounting for cross-categorial
predication and the second for intra-categorial predication. I am
more inclined to think that'X is a Y' is in fact not predicative at
all, but expresses an identity statement, in which one of the terms
is expressed indefinitely. These identities can be used to make the
scheme of categories hierarchically consistent in the following
way. Suppose that x is an F and y is a G, and suppose that we have
grounds for supposing either that the individuals or the
predicables belong to different categories. Then we put the other
term into different categories as well. This procedure would of
course not be available in the case of predication as normally
understood. The difference is that whereas something can have
properties in different categories, it cannot be identical with
things in different categories. 30 When this fact is not taken into
account, Aristotle's odd-sounding pronouncements on the subject of
accidental sameness (see 111.1) can be interpreted as incorporating
non- standard or confused views on identity: see Nicholas P. White,
"Aristotle on Sameness and Oneness", The Philosophical Review LXXX
(1971), and "Origins of Aristotelian Essentialism", The Review of
Metaphysics XXVI (1972-73), Alan Code, "Aristotle's Responses to
Quine's Objections to Modal Logic", Journal of Philosophical Logic
5 (1976), and S. Marc Cohen, "Essentialism in Aristotle", The
Review of Metaphysics XXXI
(1977-78). 31 A longer catalogue of Aristotelian texts committed
to the existence of such entities will be found in Robert Heinaman,
"Non-Substantial Individuals in the Categories". Phronesis XXVI
(1981), especially pp. 295-7. 32 An ancestor of a fragment of this
paper was presented to the Canadian Philosophical Association in
Halifax, June 1980 and was acutely commented on by David Hitchcock.
A complete draft was criticized in detail by Charles Kahn. Both
these philosophers not only saved me from error but made a large
number of useful positive suggestions. Alastair McKinnon made it
possible to process the final version on McGill University's
computer.
135
Article Contentsp. 113p. 114p. 115p. 116p. 117p. 118p. 119p.
120p. 121p. 122p. 123p. 124p. 125p. 126p. 127p. 128p. 129p. 130p.
131p. 132p. 133p. 134p. 135
Issue Table of ContentsPhronesis, Vol. 28, No. 2 (1983), pp.
113-212Front MatterGreek Ontology and the 'Is' of Truth [pp.
113-135]Did Chrysippus Understand Medea? [pp. 136-149]Rechts- und
Staatsphilosophie bei Cicero [pp. 150-176]Philoponus on "De Anima"
II.5, "Physics" III.3, and the Propagation of Light [pp.
177-196]Discussion NotePrime Matter: A Rejoinder [pp. 197-211]
Editor's Note [p. 212]Back Matter